In our 1984 essay, The Pomeron Story, we wrote “In their seminal paper [1]} Chew and Frautschi asserted that all hadrons are composite; they lie on Regge trajectories. \(\ldots \ldots \) " To account for the near constancy of hadronic total cross sections, it was necessary for them to postulate the existence of a Regge trajectory with vacuum quantum numbers and zero-energy intercept at \(j=1\) , even though no physical particles were known at the time to lie on the trajectory. This Regge singularity, which was also proposed independently by Gribov, is known as the Pomeron.
